On Wings of Qi: Chapters 7-13 (Patreon)

Chapter 7

We spent the next five hours talking about the good points of Bortus, specifically about how he had treated each of us well. We also spoke about what we would miss about living in the Gentle River Sect. During that conversation, Naomi remained silent, except to talk about how Bortus comforted her when her parents ascended to the Academy layer, leaving her as a young girl. She would have been totally alone in the world without him.

When we landed on a contest ground, one of the freakish white orbs floated over and Taka handed it a core that was roughly the size of a grape, which I knew couldn’t be more than Earth grade, which was still freakishly expensive. He looked back at me as if to say, “What’re we gonna do about it?”

We sparred there for the day. I even went as far as to spar with the four Heart cultivators, all of them against me, which was fun. I won handily, but it was still fun. As it was getting late, Taka walked over and handed the giant white orb with a rudimentary face on it another small core before telling us that we were safe to sleep there for the night.

As we sat around the fire that night, he laid out a plan, “If I use a triangular disc tomorrow, we can make it to the administrative building in roughly fourteen hours. Assuming everything there goes well, we’ll have plenty of time to spar for the day and do whatever you have to in the administrative building.” He looked at everyone around the fire, “Any objections?”

Aria held up a hand, “Okay, I know what circle, square, and triangle coins do as disks, but I’ve seen Keiko gamble and she has other shapes of coins. How do those work as disks?”

I faked being shocked as I looked at Keiko, before laughing, “We’ve been wondering the same thing. We have hexagons, octagons, and something I’ve been told is called a heptagon? It has seven sides. It might behoove us to figure out what those do, maybe even tonight.”

As if she’d been prepared for the question, Keiko pulled out a hand containing three coins, one with six sides, another with seven, and finally one with eight. She tossed them to Taka, who bobbled them for a moment before catching them. She laughed, “Get to flying, Fly Boy.”

We all laughed for a good while, before going back to enjoying the dinner I cooked for everyone. Following dinner, the Heart cultivators all went to bed, they weren’t nearly as hearty as the rest of us were.

Taka took advantage of the large open space he had access to and took each of the three oddly shaped disks out for a test ride.

The results were unexpected. The hexagon flew a lot like a circular disk, but it couldn’t fly in curves. It had to fly at the angle of the points of the disk, which meant he couldn’t turn while flying, only fly at thirty, sixty, and zero degrees from where he was going already. He quickly discounted the hexagon and tossed it back to Keiko, citing that it was borderline useless. He noticed that it was a little bit faster than the standard round disk, but the lack of maneuverability was a killer. I feared the same would be the case for the other two shapes, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Taka hopped on the heptagonal disc and flew around like a bird, it was truly impressive. When he came back to us, he stated that the heptagon was a definitive improvement over the round disk that he’d been flying on for years. It had nearly the same level of stability, but it was about twenty percent faster.

When he tried the octagon, he flew around for two hours before coming back with an enormous grin on his face. He wouldn’t even give the coin back.

“I’m keeping this one, you have more.”

He moved to sit down, but Keiko held out a hand to him, “What do you mean? Why would I need to have more?”

“This is the best disk I’ve ever flown on and I’m not giving it back. You have to fly on something else, because this is mine.” He was seriously possessive of the octagonal coin, which made sense after we heard what he said next.

“The octagonal disc is seventy percent faster than a round disk and is nearly as stable as a square disk. I’m surprised everyone isn’t flying on one around here, honestly, it’s a bit freakish. I’m almost glad no one else is on one of these,” he held the coin tightly, “if they were, I never would have won a real race!”

Keiko looked at him strangely, “Can’t you just press one of your round disks into an octagon? That’s a valuable coin, I want it back.”

Taka laughed, “Why do you think we use golden disks to fly around on? Gold’s properties are different in here than out in the real world, at least that’s what I’ve heard, it’s damn near indestructible in here. Try shaping your gold coins into a different shape, you’re plenty strong, you should be able to do so quite easily. Yes, I do mean ‘should’.”

Taking the bait, she did just that. She tried to squish her round disk into any other shape, but she couldn’t do it. Eventually, she pulled out the Dawnblade and cut one of the arcs of the round coin. While that was brilliant, it was also incredibly dangerous. The cut parts of the coin started to vibrate before they started to glow slightly along the cut and then sprung apart like qi blasts, the larger of which narrowly missed my leg before burying itself in a rock nearby. A few moments later we heard it break through and shoot off into space. I wasn’t able to track where the small piece went, but I later found out that it went through Julian’s favorite pillow, but he didn’t tell anybody about it, just suffered through it.

I nodded to Taka, “That explains it. Gold is weird in here and we should not try to reshape those coins. Noted.” I looked at Keiko, “Don’t you have a dozen more of those octagonal coins in your purse? Why are you trying to get back the one you gave Taka?”

She looked at me, affronted, “My father, a respected elder of Roh City, was a businessman. Do you think any daughter of his would go so far as to waste a coin like that? I think not.” She tried her best to keep it in, but quickly started giggling and eventually devolved into laughter, which got me laughing as well.

Taka looked at us like we were crazy, “What’s so funny? She’s still not getting the coin back, but I’d like to know why you’re laughing so hard.”

Keiko wiped a tear from her eye, “I am so not my father’s daughter, I was always going to let you keep the coin. I was just seeing how long I could keep that act together!” She smiled wide, “With the help of our new disk, we should make it to the administrative building a lot faster now, that’s awesome.” She stood up from where she’d had her laughing fit and brushed off her Robes of Sun and Moon, “I’m going to bed, I’ll see you in the morning.”

Taka and I exchanged a glance before I shrugged and turned to follow Keiko to where we were going to set up the Centering Lotus for the night. We expanded it out to nearly the width we used while practicing our Dragon Dancing, before folding up the petals nearly all the way up. It gave us a sense of security, which I didn’t feel was going to be something we had in large supply going forward.

Chapter 8

After waking up and eating breakfast, our trip to the administrative building was uneventful. When we arrived, what we saw was a large black stone building, very similar to the trial site for the Trial of the Dragon Dancers.

Taka dropped Keiko and I off at the entrance, before backing away from the very small landing zone. “We’ll be back when we see you guys exit, it wouldn’t do to block the entrance.” He quickly moved the disk fifty or so feet away, before stabilizing.

Keiko looked at me and held up a hand toward the arch leading into the building, “After you.”

I walked through the arched tunnel and around the corner to find myself in a room that reminded me a lot of a counting house that could have been in Roh City. There, they would lend out money to those who needed it, the greedy monsters they were. I remember being tempted by them when grandfather wouldn’t have enough to buy food for himself, only for me. He had to physically restrain me from going to borrow coins on more than one occasion, before he told me about how they would take everything from us, everything we’d ever earned, if he couldn’t pay back the pittance we’d borrowed. I never went back, was never even tempted to go back, to one of those counting houses. The thought of it made my skin shiver, which earned me a strange glance from Keiko, but I shook my head and continued on.

We walked through the room to find a pair of young women sitting at a large desk. They looked at me with oddly unintelligent eyes before the one left spoke, “What brings you to the administration building?” Her voice was entirely monotone, with no emotion in it at all.

Sensei spoke to me quickly, “They’re automatons, not people. It’s uncommon to see them shaped so much like humans, but it does happen. Odds are that they’ve been here since the Inheritance was created.”

I shook my head in disbelief, “We were told to check out a gift from Bortus of the Gentle River Sect.”

The automaton on the right spoke, “Understood, would you like to receive the three sectors that have been gifted to you? All we need is the name of your Sect.”

Keiko slapped me lightly on the back, “You’re in charge of naming things. Remember, we talked about it.”

I glared at her before turning back to the automaton, “Do I have to lead the Sect to receive the gift?”

The automaton blinked, “Please provide the name of your Sect.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I scratched my head, “It’s the Dragon Dancing Sect.”

The automaton on the left spoke, “Sect name unregistered, would you like to register that Sect name? The registration fee is one earth grade qistone or earth grade beast core.”

I sighed before holding out the earth grade fire beast core Keiko and I had taken from the Magma Goat back when Keiko figured out Arctic qi for the first time. I looked at Keiko, “It’s only fitting,” I laughed as I scratched Ellie on the head frill up where she was wrapped around my shoulders.

She sighed contentedly before going back to sleep. She’d been sleeping a lot lately, Sensei and Taka agreed that it was probably because her third element was finalizing, she was going to be able to use wind qi fully soon and the evolution was taking a lot out of her.

The left automaton reached out to take the core and as soon as she touched it, it disappeared.

“Earth grade fire beast core accepted. Dragon Dancing Sect registered. Please have the two Sect leaders step up and put their hands on the glowing sigils.” A pair of glowing sigils appeared on the desk before the automaton.

I looked to find Keiko already moving her hand toward the sigils, so I followed suit. Once both our hands reached the sigils the automaton spoke again, “Please inject a strand of qi into the sigil to bind it.”

Both of us followed instructions and a few moments later a small tattoo of a pair of entwined dragons appeared on the back of both of our hands, before slowly fading.

The left automaton spoke once more, “Would you like Sect admission seals? If so, how many? They each cost one basic grade qistone.”

I wordlessly held out a bag of fifty basic qistones, which were then swapped for one hundred sheets of paper with a similar glowing sigil on them to what we’d touched to establish the Sect.

The automaton on the right spoke again, “Please say the name of the receiving Sect.”

Keiko laughed, “The Dragon Dancing Sect, Sect leaders Steven and Keiko Roh.”

“Accepted, please check your Sect master sigil to assure that you have received what was gifted.”

I looked at the automaton strangely, “What do you mean?”

Keiko looked at her hand strangely before touching it with a finger and sending a thread of qi into it. A moment later, she laughed, “The tattoo on the back of our hands is the sigil she’s talking about. It says that we control three Sectors, they’re the three surrounding this location besides the one that’s going to become available next week, the one with the haikus. Bortus gave us a large gift, we owe him.”

Seeing as the two attendants were both automatons, I didn’t feel the need to say goodbye, so I didn’t. Keiko and I walked out of that office, which still gave me the willies, before standing on the steps to wait for our companions to come back down. After we got on the disk and got settled, we explained what had happened and how Bortus had given us such a large gift.

Aria and Gong Jin both held out their hands expectantly. When I looked at them quizzically, Aria laughed.

“Well, give us those papers. At least enough for the six of us.” She looked at Gong Jin and her four followers, “We’re joining your little Dragon Dancing Sect. The name isn’t half bad, though it is a bit on the nose.”

I wordlessly handed her six of the formation laden sheets of paper she had requested. A few moments, and a few bright flashes of light, later Keiko informed me that we officially had eight members in our Sect. I left the Sect management interface to her. I may have been better with math than Keiko, but she was far and away better with reading log books than I was, she learned something watching her father work all those hours.

Taka smiled, “Awesome, I think one of the Sectors nearby was where one of the older Sects was before the Indus Sect ate all of them. There should be places for us to sleep and train there, though I don’t know much else will be there. If we’re lucky, Keiko can reactivate the formations of the place and we’ll have a bit more defense against whoever might come looking for us.”

Keiko and I nodded wordlessly toward him, kind of shocked that he knew so much about where we were, and Taka set off for the place we were going to call home for a while.

Half an hour into the flight Naomi knuckled me in the shoulder, startling me out of my reverie, “Where are our papers? Do you not want us in your Sect?”

I looked at her strangely, “I don’t know how leaving a Sect works in here, is it going to be painful to you? I don’t know what I don’t know.”

She shook her head, “It does hurt a bit when the mark fades from your hand, but that’s about it. Taka and I left the Gentle River Sect before we even met you at the gates, we were committed to leaving. Now, give us the damn papers.” She held out her hand expectantly.

I looked at Keiko and saw her nodding enthusiastically, so I gave Naomi two of the Sect admission papers. A few moments later Keiko informed me that we had two new members of our Sect, bringing us to a grand total of ten. She said that with ten Sect members were now entitled to the same digest of information every day that Bortus and Alayna were getting, which would be useful in the coming days.

I smiled, “We’re happy to have you, welcome home.”

Naomi teared up for a moment, before quickly hiding behind her hand and coughing to cover it up.

Taka spoke up, “If you look in the distance, you can see the island I was talking about. It isn’t huge, but there’s a pretty big compound on it. It’s probably big enough to house at least thirty people, let alone the ten we brought with us.”

I followed his extended finger out and finally saw the island he was talking about. It was far in the distance, but I could tell that there was a pretty large building on the island. However, there was almost nothing else there.

As we drew closer, I saw more details about the building, it was octagonal in shape, which made a lot of sense if you thought it was built back when everyone knew about all eight types of qi. In the center of the compound was a small pagoda, which was only three stories tall, and around the outer portion of the compound were totems that Keiko later explained would be able to be activated to create a barrier over the compound. Sensei taught her how to fix them, so they would be able to act as some sort of defense mechanism against the onslaught we were likely to receive from both the Indus Sect and the Gentle River Sect.

We took the next week to settle into our new home, Keiko and I moved into the central pagoda, which was like the one of the Gentle River Sect, but much smaller. We didn’t lock the front doors to it though, all that was required for entry was the touch of the hand of a single member of our Sect, and the doors were usually open. We sparred in the sand pit on the first level, just like we had with Bortus and Alayna, which was a melancholy thought. We had trained for months with them. Alayna taught me everything I knew about fighting with my spiked chain after I took it from Bocca. If I hadn’t learned how to fight with it, I would’ve died in the Trial of the Dragon Dancers.

After Keiko and Sensei inspected the rest of the compound, they found that most of the formations were just deactivated, nothing more. There were a few broken ones, specifically formations for preventing physical entry, but he was able to coach her through rebuilding them over the course of a few days.

With nothing much else to do, we fell into an easy pattern. We cultivated, ate, sparred, and then repeated before going back to sleep and doing it all over again on the next day. We went out and captured a number of additional Sectors, but nothing more than three or four Sectors away from what we already controlled. Aria won her haiku competition handily, her haiku was beautiful, but she would’ve won no matter what because no one else competed. She was so proud, we didn’t have the heart to tell her, because that competition was some blind for some reason. We told her that her haiku had been the most beautiful and that none of the other competitors even compared, which wasn’t technically untrue. She crowed for weeks about it, but no one had the heart to tell her that she won uncontested.

Finally, it was the day before the protections were going to drop on the layer. I looked out from the window of the pagoda that Keiko and I called home and saw what could only be described as a massive army of disks surrounding our compound.

I turned to Keiko with a grim smile, “We’re not going to be bored, are we?”

Keiko grinned wolfishly, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” She walked over and pulled the rope attached to the bell atop the pagoda, causing it to ring loudly throughout the compound.

She walked over to the window I was standing in front of and yelled, “Alright ladies and gentlemen, it’s almost time, everyone gather up in the pagoda. We’ve got a fight on our hands!

Chapter 9

As Keiko and I stood on the stairs of the pagoda we’d called home for the previous few weeks, I was not impressed with the forces arrayed before us. I could say one thing definitively, our group had a lot of top end. With Naomi, Taka, Aria, and Gong Jin, our fighting force probably had more outright cultivation power than the force that was arrayed against us. The four of them were all Sages, and mid-Sages at that. On the Battle Layer, Dukes weren’t allowed to exist, so I thought Sages were as good as Emperors there. Sensei informed me that I was entirely incorrect about that, but I moved on. Keiko and I were a strong set of Saints, but we didn’t hold a candle to what a pair of powerful Sages could do. Even as the Sect leaders, we would be relegated to handling the small fries, because the bottom end of our fighting force was not going to be able to get that done.

The former Indus tribe members that Aria and Gong Jin had rescued on the first layer were all still Heart cultivators, which probably would’ve been worth something in a regular army, but this was not that. Of the foes arrayed before us that I was able to get a read on before they backed out of range, I didn’t feel a single one of them who were weaker than Brain cultivators. On a battlefield like that, a Heart cultivator wouldn’t last a minute, let alone through the absolute slog that this had the potential to become.

I thought about the additional tools that Keiko and I had to use and wasn’t impressed. I had a decent amount of poison available, but with enough people around who knew my proclivities, there was a very high likelihood of someone being prepared to blast my poison cloud toward my allies, who hadn’t tempered their bodies against my specialized poisons like Keiko and I had. Unless there was absolutely no other way to survive, I wasn’t going to be using poison in the fight at hand.

Aria and Gong Jin were leading their charges through stretching exercises, doing their best to keep them calm. When she felt me watching her, she looked at me and shook her head sadly. She knew as well as I did that there was no way we could let her charges fight in the melee. They would only get in our way.

Keiko squeezed my hand in a show of solidarity. I knew that no matter what, she had my back, and I had hers.

I cleared my throat to get everyone’s attention. All eyes were on me as I took a step down the stairs to address the group, “So, the nonaggression seals expire at midnight tonight. We can expect that we will immediately be assaulted by all of the surrounding members of the Indus Sect. There’s no need to beat around the bush about it, we can all see them, they’re not even trying to hide. I’d like to go over the battle plan with everybody, I know we practiced it, but it can’t hurt to reiterate.”

I gestured over to where Naomi and Taka were preparing what looked to be some sort of ballista. Sensei had walked them through repairing it in the days prior. Naomi had revealed that she was actually Alayna’s apprentice in the art of formations, though she claimed to not have much talent for it. She and Keiko were able to inlay the fifty, or so, ballista bolts with formations to increase their range, damage, and ability to breach barriers.

The barrier breaking formation was something I brought up as an idea and Keiko ran with it. They were an imitation of the Barrier Breaker beasts that Sensei told us about back in his time. They used a mixture of wind qi, metal qi, and fire qi oscillating in a pattern that tore through formations like a hot knife through butter. We only had enough materials to make five of those, so we’d have to make them count, because they had the highest likelihood of actually damaging the opposed heavy hitters.

I smiled, “Tamara, Jonas, Julia, Cindy… you’ll be in charge of manning the ballista up in the attic of the pagoda.” I looked over at Aria and Gong Jin, “You two are in charge of taking as much of the enemies’ attention as possible,” I pointed at Taka, “so Taka and Naomi can pick off choice targets from above.”

Just as I finished saying that, Naomi finished fiddling with the ballista and swept it up into her spatial ring before running past me with a wave as she headed into the pagoda behind me. I knew she’d head up to the top floor, the attic really, and set up the ballista there. That was what the four heart cultivators would be doing, loading and firing the ballista at our foes, doing their best to keep groups from surrounding the rest of us. The pagoda was covered in defensive formations, so I was relatively confident that they would be safe up there. It took three of the four of them to pull back the string on the ballista, the crank having been lost, so it fell to Tamara to actually fire the ballista, it’s a good thing she turned out to be a pretty good shot with it.

I smiled at the former Indus Tribe members, “would you four please go up and help Naomi? She’ll need help laying out the ballista the way you want it. I’m entrusting you with watching our backs, so I need you to be prepared.” I patted each of them on the back in turn as they ran past me, “Don’t forget, we’re counting on you.”

One of them muttered under their breath about wanting to fight, but I pretended I didn’t hear them. This wasn’t a fight for people like them, they were to be nurtured, not sent to the slaughter.

When I turned to look back at Aria and Gong Jin, I found them standing stock straight and nervous as anything. Keiko and I both walked forward and each put a hand on one of their shoulders.

Her voice had a soothing quality to it, “We’ve done all we can to prepare. All that’s left is for us to see if our preparations were good enough. There are no clever tricks, escape mechanisms, or anything else left. Either we win this fight, sending the Indus Sect fleeing or to their deaths, or we die.”

I continued from there, Keiko having gotten a little bit choked up, “There’s over one hundred of them up there, I think I counted one-fifty, but they look a lot alike, so I’m not entirely sure. If that’s the case, if we win, we’ll have taken out a large portion of the Indus Sect. If they attack again, assuming we survive this attack, maybe we’ll be able to end this war before it really gets going.” I laughed, “We can only hope.”

Aria shrugged, but I could feel her shaking. She was no stranger to combat, but she’d told me why she was afraid of fighting as a group the day before. She had badly wounded a few of her compatriots back when she was helping defend Sun’s End. That was why she always ran off on her own during fights, at least before she became partners with Gong Jin. They could each read each other’s movements perfectly, so they fought like a well-oiled machine, in perfect harmony.

Gong Jin was perfectly calm, “In the Moonbeam Clan, we have a saying. ‘In battle, fight like the wind, not like the sun.’ When I asked my father what that meant as a child, he told me that it meant men and women do not possess the unending strength of the sun, so they have to fight like the wind, flitting around the battlefield and striking wherever their enemy is weakest. He explained that the sun just kept beating down every day, doing its best to force everything into submission, while the wind sneaks up on you, looking for a parasol left outside or a robe to be perfectly tented on the line before striking. We just have to be the wind, not the sun in this fight.”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed before seeing Gong Jin’s face darken. I held up my hands defensively, “I mean no offense, it just sounds a lot like something my grandfather would’ve said. I found it strangely comforting. He was a warrior, but not one of any great cultivation. He mostly fought in skirmishes with bandits and other malcontents in his travels, but he was always full of little things like that.”

I felt Gong Jin’s shoulders slump, he was back to his usual placid self. He nodded, even as he backed up to square up against Aria in a basic paired kata stance, not unlike the one Keiko and I used every morning.

“Your grandpa sounds like a wise man, I wish I could’ve met him.”

Seeing as Gong Jin was preoccupied, I didn’t respond, though I couldn’t help but feel the same way. I felt the same way about all my companions. I wished my grandfather had been able to meet them, to get to know them as I did, and understand how they were helping shape me as a person and as a cultivator.

Keiko squeezed my arm, “It’s gonna be okay, it isn’t going to be like the day we left Roh City. I’m with you this time and I’m never going to let anyone hurt you like that again.”

I’d done my best to forget that day, but the beating I received from the trumped-up lordlings still gave me some phantom pains to that day. Despite the fact that I’d managed to escape, it was still humbling to know that I wasn’t undefeated. On the day of my greatest triumph, becoming partners with Keiko, I also had the worst beating of my life.

Taka strolled over, oddly nonchalant for the tense situation we were in, “Everything is ready, Boss. Should we all go to sleep so we’re rested for midnight?” He had his hands behind his neck and he looked more relaxed than I’d ever seen him before, which was odd.

Sensei spoke up from my hip, “No, sleeping before the battle is all well and good if you haven’t cultivated to at least the Brain level, but if you have, it is better to work oneself in a state of as close to Nirvana as you can before the battle. The more in tune with your body you are before a fight, the more effective in combat you’ll be. Knowing oneself is just as important as knowing your enemy.”

Taka bowed, “Understood, Sensei. I’ll wait for Naomi to come back and then start cultivating with her. It’s only midafternoon, so we’ve got nine or so hours before the seals effects fade.”

I saw his eye twitch, before he quickly covered it up by shaking his head, “I’m worried that the Gentle River Sect is going to come up behind the Indus Sect and attack us after we take care of them. Alayna is ruthless like that. She’ll have no qualms about attacking a wounded foe to get what she wants.”

That’s what I was afraid of as well, but I did my best not to show it.

“You’re not wrong. In the little time I knew Alayna, I knew her to be ambitious and strong. Both of those things could lead her to do something like that, but we can’t discount the effect Bortus should be having on her. If he has any say, we’ll be safe after we get rid of the Indus Sect, at least for a little while. He’s too honorable for anything less than that. If we see them afterward, we’ll know that Bortus has completely lost control.”

As Taka started at my response, Naomi ran out to the door and tackled him to the ground with a giggle. They rolled around like school children in the grass to the side of the pagoda. Seeing as they were enjoying themselves, Keiko and I turned around and went back to our bedchamber. Once there, we blew off a bit of steam before eating a bit of food and cultivating.

I was frustrated that we hadn’t advanced our cultivation in a meaningful way since entering Eclipse Academy. We were still in the middle of Saint and it didn’t feel like we were growing any stronger in our cultivation.When I asked Sensei about our progress, he told me that it takes ten times the effort and time to advance through Saint as it did to advance through Brain. The problem is that most people didn’t have that kind of time once they reached Saint, which is why so few people advanced past that level. That is if they even made it past Brain, where most people finish their lives if they live to old age.

He explained that we were well on our way to advancing to become Sages, but that we should focus on perfecting our qi control, not on trying to quickly advance our cultivation. Until we had the materials for our next Foundation Building pill, we shouldn’t even try to break through the Sage, or there could be dire consequences to our cultivation bases.

After we finished cultivating, Keiko went to work on a few foundations to calm down while I enclosed myself in a three-quarters closed Centering Lotus with Sensei’s pot between my crossed legs.

“Sensei, I need something that will give me an edge, should the worst happen and Keiko is put in mortal peril. I trust our compatriots, but I have to be able to protect her, it’s just who I am.” I entreated Sensei, he had to understand what I meant, he just had to.

Sensei was slow to respond. I waited nearly ten minutes for him to speak up, but his eventual answer surprised me.

“It’s not a good idea, but I agree. I didn’t tell you this before, but there’s a reason it took my wife and I so long to reach Emperor. I created both of us life-saving pills back when we were Dukes. We both ended up using them at peak Duke and ruptured nearly all of the qi channels in our bodies. If it weren’t for the fact that I’d already created pills that would help us recover from those wounds, we might never have made it past that stage.

“The problem is, there’s nothing I can help you make right now that would give you the edge you’d need.” He paused before continuing, “However, I can walk you through overcharging your cores, though it’s incredibly dangerous. Given your enormous lower core, there’s a chance you’ll be fine and this will become a powerful technique for you to use later. Are you interested? This is not a decision to make lightly, it can leave you crippled if you aren’t prepared for the backlash. It might even kill you if you’re not ready for it.”

It was a lot to think about, anything that Sensei said was dangerous enough that it could kill me, was probably something incredibly dangerous. I’d been hoping for something like that, but knowing that it was something innate, I was both intrigued and terrified. What if someone else had that kind of ability? What if Keiko and I ran into that kind of technique on the battlefield? What would we do?

I brought up those concerns to Sensei.

His tone was grave, “This technique isn’t something most people can do. It kills ninety percent of cultivators who try to use it. Some even say it’s how you are supposed to detonate your cultivation base in the event you don’t want to be captured by an enemy. Do you still want to learn it?”

“I do, but I genuinely hope I don’t have to use the technique. I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I could've saved her and didn’t because I was too afraid to use the technique.”

I wrung my hands as I waited for him to respond.

“It isn’t a complicated technique, that’s where everyone goes wrong. While they’re trying to supercharge their entire bodies, that’s how you explode your cultivation. Don’t do that. What you really want to do is spin up every ounce of qi you can in your lower core and then thrust it straight through your Heart core and out into the rest of your body, all at once.”

I gasped, but Sensei continued. “Yes, every ounce of qi you have in you needs to be shoved through all at once. If there’s anything left, there won’t be the void in your Lower core that you’ll need to bleed off the eventual feedback you’ll get from your body. For you, there’s an unexpected upside to this technique. All the qi impurities generated by this technique should land back in your lower core, which you have Ellie to take care of. The next time you cultivate with Keiko after that using this technique, Ellie will have a feast.

“Now, because of your Dragon Dancing paired cultivation method, your body is already as tough as a Sage, or at least close to it. That’s because it has greatly strengthened your Heart core, enlarging it and your Brain core slightly. From what you’ve told me of the rest of the inscriptions in the scroll you received, those you could read at least, that will continue to happen as you advance from now on. You’re very lucky that you took that trial this early. Because of it, you have a much greater chance of surviving the overcharging of your body. Because your body is so much stronger than the qi you can generate, it should be able to hold itself together.

“The effects of overcharging your Heart core are greatly increased strength and speed, along with durability. The problem is that you won’t be able to use any qi constructs, all of your body parts will be infused with qi, so you’ll just be significantly faster, stronger, and hardier while using this method. I know that’s very unlike your normal combat style, but you can use that your advantage if your opponent knows you, knows how you fight.”

He paused for a few moments before continuing, “I don’t want you to have to use this technique, but if Keiko’s life is in danger, don’t hesitate. I’ve seen friends tear themselves apart because they didn’t protect the ones they loved when they could have. They were never the same and I desperately don’t want that for you. You’re strong enough to survive without Keiko, matter what you think, but you wouldn’t be the person you are now without her.”

I debated lowering the petals of the Centering Lotus as I contemplated everything Sensei and I had talked about, but in the end, I left them up. I needed a bit of privacy to work through my inner turmoil. I stayed there until dinnertime, when I cooked everyone dinner for the final time before the battle. I just hoped that the next time I cooked for everybody, I’d still need to make eleven portions.

Chapter 10

Everyone was in position. The Heart cultivators well up in the pagoda, ready to fire the ballista when they got a clean shot.

Aria and Gong Jin stood equidistant between the open gates and the pagoda, they were ready for enemies to charge through the gates, though I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen.

Naomi and Taka were up on their disk, ready to provide air support to those of us on the ground. With his new octagonal disc, Taka was confident that he’d be able to avoid nearly any type of qi construct sent their way, providing Naomi a fantastic place to pull out her bow and show us what she was made of. Originally, I was surprised that Naomi’s weapon of choice was a bow, seeing as I’d never seen her shoot one while sparring. When I thought about how Taka’s weapon of choice was a whip, it made sense. Taka kept them at bay while Naomi peppered them with arrows, it was a lethal combination.

As for Keiko and I, we were positioned at the base of the pagoda, just outside its wards. Our plan was to use Dragon’s breath to weed out as many of the cultivators who made it through the initial barrier as possible. We had debated having Keiko pulse the barrier to allow groups of Indus Sect members in in waves, but they took too long to reactivate. If we’d done that, nearly everyone would have gotten through immediately, which wouldn’t have been survivable.

We were all standing, anxious, excited and terrified all at once when the sound of a large bell started tolling and a familiar deep voice came from the clouds, “At the end of this announcement, the layer-wide nonaggression seals will be null and void for the Battle layer. We wish all of you good luck.” As the final word was spoken, the bell tolled the twelfth time.

The Indus sect members swept forward like a swarm of locusts, each of them throwing their favorite type of qi blast at the barrier surrounding our compound. Despite the sheer ferocity of our opponents, our barrier barely shook, and for a moment I thought we might have it easy.

I was very wrong.

Just after the first salvo of attacks from the Indus Sect finished, a large man in black robes with a bone mask covering his face raised a fist before throwing it forward and launching an enormous fist of, strangely dark, earth qi at our barrier with a scream.

“Fist of the Earth God!”

The impact of that qi strike was unlike anything I’d ever seen, it may even have been stronger than the original qi beam Keiko and I produced during the Heart cultivator tournament in the Inheritance of the Lovers. When it struck the barrier, I heard formations popping all over the compound, but the barrier did hold, though it was obviously shaken.

Just as I was relieved to see the black robed man not going for another qi strike that would have destroyed our barrier, I saw the person who I could only assume was his partner float up next to him on her own disk.

She wore a blood red set of robes with a matching white mask to her partner. She raised her hands above her head and screamed, “Hellfireball!”

As the twenty-foot-wide ball of black and red fire generated in her hands, Sensei quickly spoke to Keiko and I. “That qi projection contains fire qi and dark qi. You need to kill her as soon as possible. The barriers here were so damaged that Keiko wasn’t able to make them fully functional. I had her disable the light qi and dark qi defenses in an attempt to shore up the other seven barriers, including the one for physical strikes. An attack like hers could destroy this barrier in two hits, maybe even one after that giant fist from her partner. It might have had dark qi in it as well, but I didn’t think to check it in time.”

When I looked at Keiko, I saw her shaking in anticipation.

My grandfather always said that no plan survives contact with the enemy, so it was time to improvise. In perfect sync, Keiko and I sprinted forward until we were right behind Aria and Gong Jin.

I leaned forward and spoke directly into Gong Jin’s ear, “The black robed man with the earth fist and the red robed woman with the black and red fireball have access to dark qi. That’s why their attacks are breaking the barrier so much. We have to take care of them immediately or the barrier doesn’t stand a chance. If it falls now, we all die.”

Keiko and I ducked down behind Aria and Gong Jin, even as we started spinning up large amounts of Arctic qi and Inferno qi for our Dragon’s breath technique. We didn’t know if we’d be using it against the group as we’d intended, but it wouldn’t do not have it ready when we needed it. There were two problems with our plan, the Dragon’s breath technique took five seconds to get ready, plus it left us defenseless when we were preparing for it.

That’s why we’d ducked behind Aria and Gong Jin, to mitigate those risks. When we’d tried carrying the qi required for Dragon’s breath through the barrier around the pagoda, it had disrupted our qi constructs and we’d nearly blown up the entire island. We would have if we hadn’t directed the explosion directly upward instead. It still took Keiko nearly two full days to repair the damage to the formation.

The Hellfireball struck the barrier and the entire courtyard shook. Tiles flew off the roof of the walls forming the exterior of the compound before clattering to the ground. The barrier was actually visible for a few moments before fading but it was long enough for us to see the enormous fissures running through it.

It appeared that some of the Indus Sect members saw the fissures as well, because they quickly darted through on their disks before banishing them to their spatial rings as soon as they came through and falling to the ground. Keiko and I were still in the midst of gathering up our Dragon’s Breath, so Aria and Gong Jin turned to deal with them, but that proved to be unnecessary.

From above, I heard the sound of a bowstring and a moment later the sound of someone gurgling on their own blood. I shot a glance over at where the six Indus Sect members who’d made it inside the barrier were and saw that two of them were on the ground, both having been pinned to the ground by the clothyard arrows from Naomi. Their partners both screamed as the two pinioned cultivators died. Seconds later those two started glowing and exploded on the spot, detonating their foundation bases and killing their fellow Sect members who’d made it to the breach with them.

From above, I heard Naomi whoop, followed by the sound of a slap, which I assumed was a high-five from Taka. That was why we let her fly around in a disk while Taka just ferried her around. She was a master archer and even Aria and Gong Jin weren’t able to take more than a few arrows from her before conceding, assuming they didn’t close quickly enough of course. Her bow was a master crafted piece of art with three earth grade beast cores of fire qi, wind qi, and metal qi embedded in it. Combined, they gave her the ability to shoot arrows that struck like lightning, which I’d seen her literally do before as well.

The gathered Indus Sect members were already ready to attack again at that point and when they unleashed their salvo, I saw attacks of each of the six primary qi types strike the barrier. Most of those attacks did nothing, but three or four opened up holes in the barrier that were large enough for the couple that launched them to slip through. Before we knew it, there were a dozen Indus Sect members in the courtyard and another four flying around on a pair of disks above us.

From above and behind me, I heard a loud ratcheting sound before I heard the sound of screaming as a pair of Indus Sect members were spiked into the ground by an enormous ballista bolt, which appeared to have been imbued with formations for speed, rather than raw damage. A cheer came from the pagoda behind me and I smiled to myself, despite the situation. Our little heart cultivators got their first kill, hopefully they’d get a few more before the end of the day.

At that point Keiko and I were ready to unleash Dragon’s Breath, so we ordered Taka to take care of his other task, dropping the barrier.

“Taka, now!” Keiko and I screamed in unison.

He didn’t hesitate, breaking a jade talisman Keiko had handed him earlier in the day and we all felt as the primary barrier of our compound went down. We heard all of the Indus Sect members start laughing as they quickly approached to swarm us, but they were too slow.

Keiko and I roared and, for once, screamed out the name of our attack, “Dragon’s Breath!”

The qi beam, condensed of Arctic qi and Inferno qi was still no wider than a bundle of incense sticks, but it looked like molten gold with threads of white and black through it, apparently Keiko and I each subconsciously channeled a bit of light qi and dark qi. Neither of us were sure which one of those we supplied, but it didn’t matter because they appeared to be in equal proportions. When the Dragon’s Breath beam ran into the first Indus Sect member, they produced a barrier of metal qi, which was sliced through a hundredth of a second later before passing into another Indus Sect member. Keiko and I didn’t stop there, we swept the beam to the right in an enormous arc, hitting sixty percent of the gathered Indus Sect members in a single enormous attack. We managed to strike the pair of cultivators who had access to dark qi, but a black and red shield sprung up in front of them and deflected our attack toward another group of the invading force, taking out ten percent more of the peons, but leaving them unharmed.

When the beam petered out, Keiko and I managed to take out seventy percent of the incoming force, but that still left nearly fifty cultivators to attack us, to attack our new home. As Keiko and I ran back toward the pagoda, panting heavily from the exertion of using that much qi at once, we saw something horrific.

Approaching the top of the pagoda was the same black and red fireball that had nearly destroyed the barrier around the entire compound. The barrier around the pagoda wasn’t nearly as strong as the external barrier, it was mostly designed to deal with stray qi attacks from the fighters in the courtyard surrounding the pagoda. When the fireball struck the top of the pagoda, there was nothing we could do. However, I heard a scream of rage from the top. I looked up just as Julian threw himself into the hell fireball seconds before it was supposed to strike the top of the pagoda.

Julia and Cindy, threw themselves into the Hellfireball, just before it struck the pagoda. As they did so, each of them glowed brightly and entwined hands before pulling each other into a deep embrace as they exploded in a burst of golden light. The force of two heart cultivators' cultivation bases detonating was enough to send the Hellfireball screaming back toward its sender, who had moved, but in that path were sixteen more Indus Sect members who were immolated by their own allies’ attack, but at what cost?

Two bright stars, strong enough of will to leave the Indus Tribe when they didn’t believe in their practices were now gone from the world. The fight wasn’t over, but I was damn sure going to make sure those two dark qi users died before it was.

The bellow of grief from Keiko and I was mirrored by that of Aria and Gong Jin, who had tears rolling down their faces. When I spun around to attack cultivators to came up between us, I saw Gong Jin sobbing even as he cleaved his vicious golden ax through a pair of Brain cultivators were trying to attack him, cleaving them cleanly in two before whirling around and spiking another one of their comrades in the chest with the other half of his weapon, a broad spike. Aria’s fists flew like comets as she unleashed punch after kick after headbutt into a single unlucky Indus Sect member, who died when she drove her knife hand through his throat and cut off his head.

She screamed, “For Julia and Cindy!” She whirled around and charged toward the next largest group of Indus Sect members, who had just alighted upon the ground of the courtyard. There were twenty of them, but that wasn’t enough to stop Aria and Gong Jin. They fought like devils - slashing, kicking, punching, and unleashing blasts of Dawn qi that coated the bodies of the Indus Sect members and immolated them. At the same time, other members of the Indus Sect screamed as they were impaled by spears of Arctic qi that shot out and froze them solid before shattering. Arrow, after qi strike, after sword slash landed on Aria and Gong Jin, but the radiant teal light of Arctic qi flowed through them as Gong Jin forced he and his partner through the fight by sheer will.

Keiko and I weren’t slouching, we were trying to come up with a plan to take out the two most dangerous members on the field. They had alighted on the top of the gate, where they stood imperiously over the battle. I had a plan, but it was relying on the last two remaining Heart cultivators in my Sect, I could only hope that they were as incensed as I was and were willing to do something a little bit risky to get back at the Indus Sect for the death of Julia and Cindy.

I quickly messaged Keiko, “Ready to follow my lead? I’ve got a plan, but it’s pretty stupid.”

She didn’t even reply, she merely settled into a runner’s stance and looked at me expectantly. I had never loved her more than I did right then, she trusted me implicitly and I was going to do my damnedest to be worthy of that.

I dashed forward, using regular fire qi to enhance my speed, so Keiko could keep up by mirroring my actions. Along the way Keiko slashed through a pair of Saint cultivators like they didn’t exist with the Dawnblade, they went to block her short sword and when she turned it into a great sword as they did so, the dramatic increase in mass caused their qi shields to break and she cleaved them both in twain, leaving twitching on the ground behind us as we sped forward toward our real targets. As I got within twenty feet of the dark qi using pair, they spoke to Keiko and I in unison.

It was like the world stopped for a moment, but it must’ve been because they were speaking so quickly that it wouldn’t have made sense if we weren’t as advanced in cultivation as we were.

“You two are a problem. Anyone who can attack with that kind of force is a threat to the Indus Sect. Join us or die.”

Time sped up again as Keiko and I completely ignored them and jumped up to get within melee range of them.

As Keiko and I jumped up to attack, I screamed to her mentally, “Same idea as the tournament, but keep your sword pointing out this time.”

Somehow, Keiko understood what I meant and when I wrapped around her and formed a shell of Inferno qi to protect us from the attacks coming from the Indus Sect members, she made sure to hold tight to the greatsword shaped Dawnblade and angled it out through the wall of my Inferno qi shell. I used the Duskguard to brace her wrists as I exhausted even more Inferno qi to cause the shell to spin, even as I grew spikes opposite the axis it was spinning around.

If it weren’t for my enormous lower core, there was no way I would’ve been able to do that, it was simply too much qi at one time, but I was willing to burn out meridians and qi channels to kill those two. With Sensei’s help, there was nearly no kind of damage I couldn’t come back from, given time and enough resources. Because of that, I knew what I had to do.

I sent our spinning ball of spiky Inferno qi plus death blade, name notwithstanding, toward the terrifying dark qi users. We spun into them and their shield resisted the Inferno qi, but they hadn’t accounted for the Dawnblade. On our first revolution, the Dawnblade sliced through their shield, leaving them defenseless, or so we thought. On our second revolution, the Dawnblade cut through another layer of shields, this one much closer to them, and it was then that the final remaining Heart cultivators up in the top of the pagoda struck.

From the top of the pagoda, I heard nothing I hadn’t heard throughout the fight, the ballista having launched a number of times during the fight, before Julia and Cindy sacrificed themselves. It was as I’d hoped, they had one bolt loaded and ready, the final one they were going to be able to launch in the entire fight and they made it count.

Just before our third revolution would’ve had the Dawnblade strike the pair of dark qi users, I heard them both grunt in pain before we struck them, the Dawnblade cleaving them in twain. Inferno qi rippled through their bodies and destroyed them, but not before I saw the ballista bolt running through the pair of them. It was covered with formations designed to break through barriers and I saw that those formations were burned out, having been expended. I also saw an enormous claw made of earth qi and dark qi suspended over Keiko and I that was about to swat us into the field of dark qi and fire qi spikes that were laid on the ground below us. If it weren’t for that ballista bolt, we would’ve bounced off the third barrier and been flattened and stabbed to death.

From the top of the pagoda, we heard a heart-wrenching cry, “For Julia and Cindy!”

When Keiko and I finally stood up a few moments later from our crazy qi spin I felt the meridians in my hands and elbows, as well as the qi channels in my arms completely burn out. For the rest of the fight, I was going to be down to my legs and it was a good thing I was adept at using them, because six Indus Sect members tried to take advantage of Keiko and my distraction at the death of their leaders to try and kill us. One pair had generated a giant mass of earth qi and were using it as a hammer to swing toward us from the side. Another pair each held bows drawn with glittering metal qi on the arrowheads while the bows were infused with wood qi. Finally, the third pair were nearly next to us with pairs of daggers glinting with toxic wood qi, though there was a bit of water qi mixed in there that I had no idea the purpose of.

I knew what the first two couples would do, big smash and big stab respectively. I wasn’t sure with the water qi was doing with the wood qi on the daggers, I wanted to ask Sensei, but didn’t have time. Keiko and I quickly leapt over the hammer that was coming at us from the side. I deflected the two arrows from the archers, while Keiko spun the Dawnblade back into a short sword and jabbed it straight to the jugular of one of the dagger wielders. It was like a choreographed dance scene during a festival back in Roh City.

Just as I was about to immolate the earth qi users, they were both smashed to pieces, literally, by the spike on the back of Gong Jin’s maul. He had thrown his maul from the ground in an attempt to save us. From above, Aria hammered into the two archers, who’d jumped to get better shot at us, with a single Dawn qi coated fist. Her ward cetus glimmered gold beneath the emerald light of her Dawn qi.

Keiko spun and kicked the remaining dagger wielder, but he managed to stab her deeply in the thigh, causing her to stagger. I wasn’t worried about poison, because unless it was made by an Expert or better alchemist, there was no way someone would have poison strong enough to actually hurt us. I was more worried about the fact that I didn’t know what the water qi on the blade was supposed to do and she’d nearly been stabbed in the femoral artery. Just as I was about to shove a healing potion in her mouth, Ellie unfurled herself from Keiko’s arm and leapt toward her leg, but not before spraying Arctic qi needles in the eyes of the man who’d stabbed her mother. They were already dead, but she didn’t know that.

Ellie bit down her wound, doing her best to impart as much Arctic qi as possible so she could to prevent whatever it was the water qi was doing, but she was too late.

I could feel as the water qi expanded and detonated near Keiko’s lower core. The pain was nearly incomprehensible, it felt like part of my body was ripping itself to pieces. I felt her psyche tear as her lower core ruptured completely.

Chapter 11

Keiko couldn’t even scream out in pain, she was just standing there, mouth agape in horrific pain that was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I fought through it for her, pouring qi into her and Ellie at the same time as I poured feelings of affirmation and love into her. The problem was, it wasn’t working, she was going insane and the rest of her cultivation base was starting to deteriorate. I felt something inside me snap and I immediately knew what I had to do.

I still don’t really know what happened during the rest of that fight due to my tunnel vision on fixing Keiko.

Because of my failure, the love of my life had been gravely wounded, and gravely so. It was because I didn’t think they were a threat, because I didn’t fear the poison, I focused on the earth qi users instead… how stupid could I be! I never should have let something I didn’t know the effect of hit her, I should have overcharged my cores and dealt with the pair of dagger wielders.

I was going to save her, I had to, even if the results could have been worse than the damage if I wasn’t perfect.

I pulled out the Centering Lotus from my spatial earring and threw it down the ground before making it just large enough for Keiko and I to sit with Sensei’s pot between us. I pulled her inside and slammed Sensei’s pot in between us, even as I left the very top of the Centering Lotus open, just a crack.

I didn’t ask Sensei for help. I didn’t need to. Something inside me knew what to do and I went with it.

I quickly banished Keiko and my weapons and armor, along with our other equipment into my spatial ring, leaving us both naked. After that, I grabbed our spatial storage devices and threw them inside the board containing the Inheritance of the Pot, before sitting down on that board solidly.

Preparations complete, I focused on pouring as much Inferno qi throughout the Centering Lotus as I could, drawing as much qi from the outside world through the crack at the top as possible while augmenting it with my internal reserves.

I heard Sensei yell at my feet, but I couldn’t hear him, I was so single-mindedly focused on saving Keiko, even as her ruptured lower core started to tear her body apart. It was never meant to hold as much qi as it did because I was around, because I was connected to her. Because of her connection to me, she was going to die a horrific death. I couldn’t let that happen.

The temperature inside the Centering Lotus had stopped rising and I knew it was time. I forced the Centering Lotus to close and triggered its protective enchantments. Those enchantments served to redouble any qi that struck it, inside or out. Because I channeled my Inferno qi through Sensei’s pot, it came out more pure, more concentrated, than usual when I did it without. I whirled the Inferno qi around and around. I was trying to use the flame wheel technique, but with Keiko and I as the ingredients.

As Inferno qi coursed over our bodies, it didn’t kill us, but instead it refined what was there. It was so painful that I nearly lost consciousness multiple times. When the flame wheel was at its most potent, I focused its energy inside Keiko through every single meridian. My Inferno qi raced through her qi pathways, strengthening them, like it had for Miriam and Clyde, before arriving where her lower core used to be. I swiftly produced the only celestial grade universal beast core I had. I’d found it when I was searching for ingredients the week before with Sensei in the Inheritance of the Pot. I knew it would have to do, so I infused it with Inferno qi and threw it through her body, after compressing it with Inferno qi until it was as small as possible. It was still enormous, so when it hurtled through her qi pathways it left an agonizing wound behind. I knew I could fix that wound in time, assuming she survived. No, she had to survive…

As soon as the celestial grade beast core reached the place where her lower core was supposed to be, I drew a blank.

I’d known exactly what to do up until that point, but I was lost. I didn’t know what to do. Because of my inexperience, my wife was going to die.

I noticed Ellie still trying to help her mother, pouring all her Arctic qi into Keiko’s wound to no avail, and knew that she would die as well due to the feedback of qi from my flame wheel technique.

I screamed, “It’s not fair!”

The Centering Lotus rock side to side with the force of the qi that I was pouring through it, burning every last ounce of qi in my body to do so. I could feel my qi channels burning, but I didn’t care. If Keiko was gone, I didn’t want to exist either.

A gentle voice sounded in my head, “You weren’t ready for this, but there isn’t time for that lecture now. Take the beast core and detonate with as close to Arctic qi as you can generate. Actually, have Ellie inject the Arctic qi, then you should manipulate it. I’m not sure if you’ll be able to do that, but it’s your only shot.” Sensei’s voice sounded sad, “If this doesn’t work and you die, the Centering Lotus will become a huge qi bomb and everyone on this island will be dead.”

I couldn’t let that happen. It wasn’t Naomi and Taka’s fault that this had happened. It wasn’t Aria and Gong Jin’s fault. It wasn’t Tamara and Jonas’ fault up in the pagoda either… it was all my fault, my sin.

I knew that Ellie was already using as much Arctic qi she could to try and save her mother, but I redirected that qi into the void that used to be Keiko’s lower core. The second before I pierced it, to detonate it like Sensei had said, I had another idea and knew it was right. I thought back to the times I’d worked with light qi and dark qi and knew that I could use them at that moment. I drew threads of light qi and dark qi from the air around me and threw them through to join with the Arctic qi before spearing through the celestial universal beast core. I heard Sensei gasp as the beast core detonated and Keiko and I blacked out.

***

When I eventually awoke, I was lying flat on my back. I tried to lean forward to get up, but didn’t have the strength to do so. My body felt drained and it took all my strength to even roll over onto my side. When I eventually managed to roll all the way over, I looked over and saw Keiko on a bed not two feet for me. I reached out a hand for her. I had to touch her, to see if she was OK. When I did, I felt my Inferno qi still racing through her body, conjoined with Ellie’s Arctic qi in an attempt to keep her alive. I knew that’s why I didn’t have access to my qi, I was subconsciously focusing every ounce of qi I had into keeping her alive.

When I checked her cultivation base, I found the universal beast core had exploded and formed some semblance of a lower core for her, but it was imperfect. It was leaking qi badly and I could tell that Ellie was pumping as much Arctic qi into her mother as she could, but she was flagging. I thought back to what I’ve been told by Sensei before the battle, when he told me about the technique to overcharge my cores. It wasn’t exactly what I needed, but it would have to do. However, I knew that it wouldn’t help if I overcharged my cores, that would kill Keiko.

I had to overcharge hers and our paired cultivation technique wasn’t the one that let me easily use techniques for my partner. We didn’t go with that one because of all of its downsides. I was going to have to figure it out on my own and quickly.

I looked deeply into Keiko’s cultivation base. I knew Keiko’s cultivation system as well as she did, probably better at this point, considering she didn’t know that she had a celestial universal beast core serving as a lower core. I focused on her brain core and found that it was perfectly fine, which was good. When I checked her heart core, I saw that it was strained, but still strong and knew that my plan would work. I focused on the outer body experience I’d had when breaking through to become a Saint, when my body had re-forged. I did my best to recapture that feeling and when it felt right, I thrust my will through my connection with Keiko. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work, but it was all it had.

Luckily enough, it did.

I felt as Keiko’s brain and heart cores overcharged and sent all the qi that was leaking from her lower core out to reinforce her body, which in turn reinforced her newly rebuilt lower core in a cycle of destruction and rebuilding. The qi inside her raged for hours after that, but I couldn’t let it stop. Every time the qi radiating through her body passed through her lower core, it was reinforced and the leak slowed.

It wasn’t until her body had been overcharged for almost three hours before her lower core stopped leaking and I could tell that it was stable. I stumbled backward as I reentered my own body and was shocked when I saw her body. The love of my life was very similar to what she’d been before but I knew she was different.

Her left eye teal now, the same color as her Arctic qi, while her right matched my Inferno qi perfectly, it was a brilliant emerald. Her formerly red hair was now red with streaks of white and black through it, along with a few streaks of teal and emerald. When I looked down at Ellie, I saw her form had changed as well, probably because of her connection to Keiko during the process. She didn’t just have three colors anymore, she had five now, and two of those were white and black. She’d also grown to be nearly six feet long and her wings had grown to match. To support her enhanced length, she’d gained a second set of wings lower down her back, though they weren’t nearly as large as her original wings.

When I looked back at Keiko, I saw that her muscles had also grown and her form enhanced, but something was wrong. Her lower core was generating qi, but no matter what I did it wouldn’t generate any attributed qi.

With a gasp, Keiko woke up and screamed, which brought the thundering of footsteps heading up the stairs into our room. Aria was the first to cross the stairs, followed closely by Gong Jin.

Gong Jin ran over, Arctic qi ready, but then noticed that it wasn’t needed. Keiko was perfectly whole, if changed inside and out.

When he turned to look at me, he was shocked, “Steven? What happened to you?”

I shuddered at what I’d done before answering, “I failed.”

I hung my head low, but Gong Jin walked up and pushed me over onto my back. He stood over me, “Answer the question. Why do you and Keiko look differently?”

I knew Keiko looked differently, but I hadn’t had a means to check out my own appearance. I looked down at my arms and legs and noticed that they had better definition to them, very similar to what had happened to Keiko. When I formed a sphere of water qi to look at my reflection, I saw that my hazel eyes had gained a ring of indescribable dark with a thread of white through it. When I stood up, I expected to feel woozy, but I felt stronger than I ever had before. I walked past Gong Jin like he didn’t exist, brushing off his hand even though he definitely used all his strength to try and stop me. I took one look at Keiko and swept up in my arms before starting to cry.

I sobbed, “I’m so sorry! I should’ve saved you! I should’ve done more!”

It took Keiko a moment to recognize what I’d said, but a few seconds later she latched her arms around me. I couldn’t have gotten her to let go if I’d wanted to.

“You didn’t fail me, you saved me. My entire body was tearing itself apart and I felt you rebuild me from the lower core up.” She looked down at her body, newly re-forged in the crucible that was the Centering Lotus, which I still hadn’t seen at that point, before continuing. “As far as I’m concerned you succeeded where no one else could have and I still love you. Actually, I love you more than ever.” She hugged me tightly before pulling me into a kiss that lasted for what felt like seconds, but could’ve been hours for all I knew.

Eventually, Gong Jin walked up and pushed me in the shoulder, “I’m only going to ask you one more time. What? Did? You? Do?”

I looked him straight in the eye and he recoiled at the look of my eyes.

“I saved my wife’s life, but I don’t know at what cost.” I held her tightly, “Would you please leave us so that we can figure out what’s going on? We need to figure out what happened.”

He scratched his head, “That’s fine, but you need to make sure you two spar with somebody today, because you both woke up, you’re no longer exempt from the sparring requirement and the tournament is in three days. There’s a melee today as well, if you’d rather go that route.” Seeing the look of shock on my face, he shrugged, “You’ve both been asleep for four weeks. I didn’t think you two would survive, but something sustained you. I don’t know what it was, but I’d love to take some time to figure it out. I’ll leave you two alone for a while.”

He turned to walk away, but then quickly spun back around, “Also, you’re going to need to request more new Sect member slips from the Inheritance, we only have two left.”

I made some noncommittal noises to do something like that, my mind was totally a blur with everything that had just happened. Eventually, Gong Jin and Aria left Keiko and I alone upstairs.

I could hear the sounds of sparring and debate coming from outside the window, but I didn’t go over and check it out, I stayed wrapped around Keiko as she sobbed.

Over the next few hours Keiko and I figured out that she could no longer generate elemental attributed qi. However, she was generating attributeless qi with no effort at all, which was supposed to be impossible. Sensei didn’t have an explanation besides the fact that the universal beast core must have done something after being re-forged by my spear of Arctic qi, light qi, and dark qi. I, on the other hand, was now able to generate as much Arctic qi as I wanted and my destroyed qi channels were fully re-forged by the human pill technique, which is what I ended up calling it.

In return for not being able to use attributed qi, Keiko’s body was reinforced ten times over. She was far stronger than any of the Sages we had access to and Sensei suggested she may even be as strong as a King cultivator, at least physically. Her body was constantly being reinforced with universal qi, which should’ve been impossible. My body was reforged slightly, but not to that extent, I was still no stronger than your average Duke cultivator, which was very strong, but not nearly as strong as Keiko.

In addition to her physical reinforcement, Sensei told her that she was actually lucky that she had already learned about formations. It turned out that higher tier formations required the use of universal qi, which wasn’t easy to get ahold of outside of qi stones or beast cores. Because Keiko could make it for herself, she would have a much easier time working those higher tier formations.

Before heading downstairs to spar, I made Keiko a promise, “No matter what happens, I’ll find a way to give you back what is rightfully yours. I promise.”

Chapter 12

Keiko and I eventually made it down to the courtyard surrounding our pagoda. When we arrived there, we found it full of people we had never met, but all of them bowed to us when they saw us. Eventually, when Keiko and I found Tamara and Jonas, the pair of Heart cultivators who managed to survive our incursion with the Indus Sect. Despite the fact that their words sounded deferential, I could tell that they were not happy with Keiko and I. To be honest, I couldn’t blame them. I had effectively left them to die in my desperate attempt to save Keiko, if it weren’t for the presence of Naomi, Taka, Aria, and Gong Jin, they definitely would have died.

When we asked to spar with them, they hesitated for a moment, but eventually agreed.

The whole time we sparred with them, I did my best to give them pointers on their form, or helpful tips on cultivation, specifically paired cultivation, that I thought they could use. While Jonas was mostly receptive to my advice, Tamara wasn’t having it. I could tell from the way she was acting that she was deeply conflicted about her status in our Sect and I knew that we needed to make amends to them.

After we finished sparring for the day, Keiko and I made our way back to the central pagoda. As we walked, she kept her hand on the small of my back, supporting me in more ways than one as we walked through the stares of our Sect members.

I messaged her, “Can you still access the Sect interface?”

She sent me the mental equivalent of a nod, along with a wave of love and positive affirmations. By the time she was done, I almost felt like I wasn’t a total piece of garbage. Almost.

“Follow my lead, there’s a couple things we have to do,” I messaged her as I stood as proudly as I could in front of our assembled Sect members. Somehow, they all came to the same conclusion that I was going to speak to them, which was good, because I was.

Keiko was standing directly behind me and to my left, one stair higher than I was to even out our heights and four of the other six members who’d survived our fight with the Indus Sect were arrayed to either side of Keiko and I. When I looked out at the assembled Sect members, I was shocked to see the variety of cultivation levels. We had everything from peak Body cultivators, all the way up to low Sages arrayed before us, not counting Aria, Naomi, and their partners. It was astounding to me that these people would have chosen to follow me, especially considering Keiko and I were unconscious for almost a month.

I stood up as proudly as I could and held my arms out wide, being careful not to whack Keiko in the face as I’d accidentally done a few times before, “Hello my fellow Dragon Dancing Sect members!” There was a small cheer, which I let go for a few seconds before continuing, “My name is Steven Roh and the woman behind me is my partner and wife, Keiko Roh. We’re the Sect leaders here and we’re both honored and humbled that you’ve chosen to join our little Sect, though it isn’t as little as it used to be. While I would love to spend hours getting to know each of you, now was not the time for that. Now is the time to acknowledge those people whose presence made this speech possible.”

I felt Keiko gently massage my back and Ellie slithered off her arm and up around my shoulders, which elicited a small gasp from a number of our assembled Sect mates. I smothered a laugh, it wasn’t time for that then.

“The first couple I would like to formally acknowledge for their combat prowess as well as administrative assistance are Aria Dawnrise and Gong Jin Moonbeam. Without them, Keiko and I would’ve died when battling the Indus Sect. Would you two, please step forward?”

From our right, Aria and Gong Jin strode forward and turned to face Keiko and I, though they kept their bodies at forty-five-degree angles to the crowd so they’d be able to see their faces as well. I could see Aria smiling, she probably knew exactly what I was going to do, but it was far beyond time to do so.

I took a deep breath, “For your service and friendship, you two will officially be named Sect elders, check your Sect tattoos and you’ll notice that the pair of dragons now glow black and white, rather than being unadorned.”

I let them take a look at their tattoos for a few moments, but afterward they both looked up at Keiko and I with smiling faces.

At least that one went well, I hoped the rest of my plan would go similarly. Maybe I shouldn’t have been scared.

Without having to be told, Aria and Gong Jin stepped back in the line to Keiko and my right.

“Next, I’d like to acknowledge the skill and tenacity of Naomi and Taka, whose family name I still do not know.”

The assembled Sect members laughed, even as Naomi and Taka stepped forward, copying what they’d seen Aria and Gong Jin do.

“For your service to the Sect and in acknowledgment of your guidance and friendship, Keiko and I would like to bestow upon you the rank of Sect elder.”

Both of them looked down at their hands to check their Sect tattoos, then looked back at Keiko and I before nodding and stepping back in line. I guess that when you grow up in a Sect, things like that don’t really rate as highly as if you didn’t.

The group of assembled Sect members before me started to mill about, thinking that my speech was getting close to finished, but they were wrong.

I spoke more loudly, “Next, I’d like to acknowledge the courage and wit of Tamara and Jonas. Would both of you please step forward?”

I heard a number of gasps from the assembled mass of people, but none of them held a candle to Jonas’ reaction.

He laughed out loud, “Now, that’s what I’m talking about!” He practically dragged Tamara up with him to stand in front of Keiko and I. I managed to stifle my grin, doing my best to appear serious before the entirety of my Sect.

“Tamara, Jonas, I’m naming the pair of you Sect elders as well. If it weren’t for your actions, Keiko and I would both be dead.”

There was a visible glow on the back of the hands of the young couple, though it faded relatively quickly. It turned out that the Sect tattoo didn’t fully settle under the skin until the cultivator reached the level of Saint, so anyone below that level actually had their tattoo visibly displayed on the back of their hands.

I nodded my head Toward Aria and Gong Jin, who stood to my right, “Go stand next to those two, where you belong.”

Tamara was shocked, totally unable to speak as Jonas dragged her over to stand in line beside their saviors. I saw Gong Jin good-naturedly jab his elbow at Jonas, who laughed and brushed it aside. It was good to see them happy, it was a rarity that I hoped would become plentiful in the coming months. One could only dream.

I took a deep breath before sighing, then spoke to the crowd one more time, “There should be two more Sect elders standing to my left, but through their heroic actions, they are no longer here with us.” I pinched my brow in an attempt to stave off my tears, but they rolled down my face regardless.

“Julia and Cindy were phenomenal people, they were funny, witty, and smart, but most of all they were loyal to their comrades and that’s all I can ask of anyone in this world, let alone in this Sect. They both sacrificed themselves to save their fellow Sect mates, detonating their cultivations to deflect a qi attack that no one standing before you would’ve been able to face without taking grievous injuries. They may have died in battle, but I want everyone here to know that they died as heroes and will forever be remembered as such in this Sect.”

As I was caught up in my grief at the loss of our two young companions, Keiko handled the silent vigil honoring our fallen comrades that followed before sending everyone on their way for the rest of the day.

Around dinnertime, I had Keiko gather up all our Sect elders and bring them to the second floor of the pagoda, which contained a sitting room large enough for all of us, with plenty of room to spare.

After we all got settled in and finished dinner, which I prepared, I looked around at all of them. Surrounding the table were allies I knew I could trust my life to.

Keiko spoke, “So, I just want to make everyone aware of the situation with my current state, whatever you’d call it. As of right now, I can only produce universal qi, which should be impossible.”

Aria and Gong Jin looked nonplussed, but Naomi gasped and Taka put his hand on her shoulder to steady her. Tamara and Jonas just flipped their gaze back and forth from all three of the pairs around the room, trying to make sense of what was going on.

I thought it was only fair to let them know why Naomi was freaking out, “Universal qi is nearly impossible to generate for most people. Generally speaking, the only way to get access to that kind of qi is through very rare monster cores or harvesting nearly entirely pure qi stones from mines. The problem is, those things are incredibly rare, so it’s very expensive for formation masters and alchemists to get access to them. Now that Keiko can produce universal qi on her own, her formation master skill is going to soar and the sky's the limit for how far she can go along that path.”

Tamara nodded along as if she understood, but Jonas just shook his head, “I still have no idea what you mean, but I trust you’ll make sure I understand if it’s really important.” He sat back and relaxed, even as Tamara slapped his leg.

Keiko laughed, “It’s okay not to understand, there are all kinds of things I don’t understand. That’s why I have Steven, he explains the complicated stuff to me.”

Everyone in the room laughed for a few moments before she continued, “Anyway, if the tournament is in four days, all we have to do is hold out until it happens, after that the Indus Sect will be inconsequential. We’ll still need to raid their compound to take care of a couple of things, namely gathering totem earrings for Naomi and Taka, as well as grabbing a pair of spirit crystals that need to be dealt with. Does anyone have anything else they want to talk about?”

Jonas raised his hand, but Tamara grabbed it and pulled it down.

I waved at him, “Don’t worry about it. What did you want to ask?”

He threw a side eye at his partner before turning to address me, “You made Tamara and I Sect elders, but what does that actually mean? We’ve never been part of a Sect before, so we don’t know what we’re supposed to do or what we’re allowed to do.”

Naomi fielded that question for us, “The Sect elder’s job is to follow the orders of the Sect leader, that’s about it. Mostly you’ll probably be put in charge of tracking new incoming members actions, no one’s going to suspect the two of you to be put in charge of anything important, so you’ll be able to suss out if anything nefarious is being done. Does that sound right to you?”

She looked over at me when I nodded, she looked back to the young pair of Heart cultivators expectantly.

Tamara shook her head, “Are you sure it’s alright to make us Sect elders? We’re just Heart cultivators, we just…”

I cut her off with a slicing motion of my hand, “Anyone with the combat sensibility to send a ballista bolt toward an enemy covered in a barrier so that their Sect leaders can have their third slash strike their enemy, has talent and they deserve whatever reward they get. So far, all I can do is give Sect eldership, though I can also work on some cultivation aids for the pair of you, if you’d like. Actually, I would do that anyway, but I can make sure they don’t taste bad if you’re nice to me.” Everyone stared at me before starting to laugh. A moment later, I joined in.

Keiko smiled as she addressed the room, “There’s nothing left for us to do except prepare for another assault by the Indus Sect…”

Aria chimed in, “That won’t be a problem. The Indus Sect hasn’t left their remaining five islands in almost two weeks. The Gentle River Sect has been laying down massive formations in the air surrounding them in an attempt to keep them trapped. Those two formation masters they got back from The Scholars are absolute geniuses, I wish they would’ve joined us instead.”

I grinned, “Sounds great to me, I guess it’s time to get ready for the tournament. No one in our Sect is in it, are they?

I looked around the room and saw that everyone was shaking their heads.

I sighed, “That’s good, for some reason I thought maybe Naomi and Taka would end up in it, I don’t know why, but it felt like it almost had to happen.” I shook my head to banish that thought, “Either way, I’m glad that isn’t the case.”

Interlude

Kabis stood in the ruined crater that was once the Indus Tribe’s village that was built surrounding the entrance to the Inheritance of the Eclipse. Gone were the houses and sounds of laughing children. Replacing that was the sound of Kabis’ ranting. He stood holding the corpse of a man in a claw-like grip, “I sent nearly five hundred more of those worms into that stars-forsaken Inheritance and now you tell me that all of them, save the twenty cowards who sparred instead of fighting for real are entered into the tournament at the end of the year?”

He squeezed his claw-like fist and crushed the corpse’s head, setting the shattered remains of it down to the ground to join the pair of totem earrings lying on the ground beneath him.

“I’m running out of sacrificial material here, I might actually have to go hunting for people myself, but not until those two rats come back out. I don’t really care how long it takes, all I care about is that they come back out and I’m here to greet them.”

He waved a hand and twisted it in a few strange gestures and a throne of black metal with spikes and skulls shaped into it appeared out of nothing. A few moments later and it settled into its shape, crafted out of raw metal qi, though a trained observer would’ve noticed threads of dark qi running throughout the construct. Kabis sat back upon his newly constructed throne and stared at the untouched portal merely twenty feet away from him.

“You little worms are not going to know what hit you when you come back out, I’m done playing around.”

From behind him came the sounds of a child coughing and he didn’t even spare a thought. He threw an arm back over his head and unleashed a lance of metal qi double the size of the one he’d thrown at Steven and Keiko as they were fleeing into the Inheritance the Eclipse. There wasn’t even a squeak, just the sound of crunch as the spear of metal qi bored a thirty-foot hole in the ground where it struck.

He laughed darkly, “Vermin, they’re all vermin. I hope I get to play exterminator. That’s always been my favorite role.”

Chapter 13

The tournament was slated to take up two days, to give the contestants who survived time enough to regenerate their qi after a day of hard fighting. Every cultivator on the Battle layer was required to attend. The Sect members all sat with their own Sects, no exceptions, though I did see Bortus glancing over longingly at Naomi and Taka. He looked haggard, like he’d been fighting for months and was slowly losing the war. Alayna, on the other hand, was glaring daggers at Keiko and I and if it weren’t for the fact that the tournament grounds was a nonaggression zone, she probably would have launched herself over and tried to kill us.

It did my heart good to look over and see that the section the Indus Sect occupied was nearly empty, merely a dozen pairs were left over there, despite them being the largest Sect on the layer. Nearly all of their members were entered into the tournament, so they were forced to wait in the rooms below the battlefield before the rest of us. Of the other sects, all three of us were actually almost at parity. The Gentle River Sect were down to about sixty-five pairs, some of them having joined our Dragon Dancing Sect. We were up to nearly eighty pairs. The scholars were at around seventy-five pairs still, but we’d managed to lure a few of them over to our side with the promise of ancient knowledge from Sensei.

I’ll spare you the gory details of the first day, which was pure slaughter. The tournament pairings were supposed to be random, but there was no way that was the case, it was clearly seeded. I saw pairs of Body cultivators going up against Saints and the results were not pretty.

The only fight the first day that really made me want to watch it was when a pair of Indus Sect Saints were up against a pair of what I learned were called Battle Scholars. Battle Scholars were members of The Scholars who focused entirely on fighting techniques and cultivation, rather than trying to discover the secrets of the universe.

The way the pair of Battle Scholars fought was fascinating. The fight between those pairs was incredibly short, only thirty seconds or so, despite the fact that both pairs were made up of Saints. The deciding factor was that the Battle Scholars simply had enough tricks to counter everything the Indus Sect members tried. The Indus Sect pair attacked directly with claws made out of metal and wood qi, which were dripping with obviously venomous wood qi, but one of the Battle Scholars merely smashed their arms down to the ground and generated a wall of earth qi while their partner moved so quickly I almost couldn’t see them before lopping off the pair of Indus Sect members’ heads. The fight was over in an instant, despite all the bravado from the Indus Sect members before. The Battle Scholars didn’t even spare their bodies a second glance as they walked back to the box they’d appeared in before they were sent away again in a flash of bright white light.

I messaged Keiko, “Is it wrong that I want them to win? I think I want to be them when we grow up.” I laughed out loud, which drew a few stares from my surrounding Sect members, but I paid them no mind.

Keiko didn’t think it was that funny, “I don’t want to be like that pair of muscle bound idiots.” She hesitated, “Okay, musclebound brainiacs. All they do is fight and think about fighting. I want to be able to enjoy life and unless we do what we’re currently doing, that’s never going to happen. Get your head in the game!” I recoiled slightly at the yelling in my head.

Sensei spoke to both of us mentally, “Steven, your desire to understand all aspects of combat is admirable, but a generalist will never succeed against someone who’s truly mastered a particular set of skills. Case in point, my wife and I mastered the use of alchemy and formations in combat. Neither one of us were particularly physically strong, nor were we very good at martial arts, but we dominated any battlefield we joined because we had mastered our skills.

“I’m not saying that you two have to be as narrowly focused as we were, but, while you should try everything, once you find five or six things that work very well, don’t keep adding things to your list of generally used skills unless there’s a good reason for it. Find a skill, then find something that counters that skill’s counter. Do that a few times and you’ll be set. Don’t worry about doing it all on your own, I’ll help you find the best set of skills that will suit you if you’d like.

“However, there is something to be said for being able to handle any kind of situation, which requires a very wide repertoire. It’s a balancing act. Just don’t just learn six versions of an earth qi wall, it’s a waste of your time.”

Keiko looked at me as if to say. “Told you so”.

I shrugged mentally, “All I’m saying is that I want to be able to do a little bit of everything. It’s always best to use the correct tool, rather than trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer.”

***

The second day of the tournament was also the final day. Due to exactly two hundred couples being entered into the tournament, the lion’s share of which were made up of one hundred eighty Indus Sect couples, the second day of the tournament was a bit odd. There wasn’t a clean way to get down to a pair of four combatants from that number, so after a pair of rounds that quartered the field down to twenty-five couples, there were melees of five couples a piece.

One of those five melees ended in mutual destruction when a single member of the Indus Sect was killed and his partner detonated her cultivation in revenge. With that, the final two round’s competitors were decided. The final four were three Indus Sect pairs and that same set of Battle Scholars that I’d had my eye on the day before. The problem was, despite the fact that there was only a single’s pair of Sages in the entire competition, they were lined up against the Battle Scholars in the semi-final round.

Despite their immense skill, they couldn’t defeat the raw power of a pair of Sages fighting for their lives. That fight went on for nearly an hour and in the end, it only finished because one of the Battle Scholars had their legs blown off. When their partner tried to heal them with wood qi, they were blown apart by the pair of Indus Sect members. I was sad to see it happen, but what happened afterward did give me a bit of catharsis. The remaining Battle Scholar didn’t even hesitate, he immediately detonated his cultivation base and killed the pair of Sages that were arrayed against him, screaming wordlessly as he did so.

Because of that, the tournament ended with a whimper, not a bang. While two hundred couples had entered, only a single pair of Indus Sect members were left and they were nothing special. They were merely lucky in their pairings.

As the other sects started gathering up to leave, I looked at the circle of Sect elders around me and whispered quietly, “Let’s go raid us an Indus Sect headquarters. Any takers?”

As I had hoped, everyone quickly agreed and, less than five minutes later, we were flying in formation to where we knew the Indus Sect headquarters would be. Ahead of us, the twenty-one remaining pairs that made up the Indus Sect all pulled out triangular disks and rocketed forward in an attempt to reach their headquarters before we did. But they couldn’t deal with the fact that Taka had been training all of the pilots in our Sect and all of them were flying octagonal discs.

Keiko had twenty octagonal gold coins and every single one of them was in use. Each disk held four couples, with the Sect leaders and Sect elders on one disk, and everyone else arrayed on their own disks. We actually beat the Indus Sect back to their headquarters by an hour, after flying for nearly seven hours straight. The problem was, the formation surrounding their headquarters was still up. Despite our overwhelming force, including Dragon’s Breath from Keiko and I and the combined might of Naomi, Taka, Aria, and Gong Jin, we couldn’t muscle our way through the barrier. No matter what we did, it didn’t even shake.

Sensei was livid, “With the amount of force your group is pouring into this barrier, there is no way that they aren’t tapping directly into the Inheritance’s energy reserves to maintain it. There’s a good reason the Indus Sect has maintained its death grip on this Inheritance. The pair that used to be part of their group that is now in charge of this Inheritance has been providing them with enough energy to survive a King cultivator’s sustained attack, let alone a group of Sages and Saints. You’ll have to wait until they breach the barrier themselves, and slip in behind them. This barrier is so strong, they’ll have to take the entire thing down for a few moments to let everyone inside. You’ll need to make sure that you get as many people inside at that time as possible, because there’s no way you’re going through it otherwise.”

We hid everyone in illusion formations of Keiko’s make, she had been working on them in the days before the Indus Sect’s assault on our headquarters. We were a bit cramped, but we managed to cram everyone into the trio of illusion formations and when the Indus Sect took down the barrier to let themselves in, all but three pairs from our Sect made it inside. Those that were left outside were the three pairs of Body cultivators who’d joined us. They just weren’t fast enough to get over the wall before the barrier slammed back into place. We could hear them shouting from the other side of the wall, but there’s nothing we could do for them because we were immediately in for a fight.

The only noteworthy members of the normal Indus Sect were five specific people. All five of them fought like demons and we later found out that they had each consumed their partners cores on the way back to their headquarters in preparation for our arrival. Each of them wore the totem earrings of their devoured partners, like savage tokens to remind everyone of their dastardly deeds.

The rest of the Indus Sect stayed back while the five men and women without partners whirled into our midst. None of them were Sages, but if there had been, that fight may have ended much differently. The pair of Saint level Demons, which is what we ended up calling those cultivators who’d consumed their partners’ cores, were so strong that only the combined might of a pair of Sages was enough to take them down.

The problem with the Demons was that they were so much stronger, physically and with qi, that normal strategies didn’t work on them. Aria, Gong Jin, Keiko, and I took care of the Saint Demons and left the rest of the Demons to Naomi and Taka, along with the rest of our Sect members. Due to her unique physical state, once she got a hold of the male Saint Demon, Keiko was strong enough to pin him down so I could spike him in the head with a blade formed of Inferno qi. Aria and Gong Jin brawled with their Saint Demon for a while longer than Keiko and I had, but they later told us it was because they were trying to identify weaknesses in their strength. When the Demons died, their cores didn’t fade or explode, they actually formed golden balls that the Inheritance absorbed after a few minutes.

Due to our overwhelming numbers advantage, we made short work of the rest of the Indus Sect members, except for the Indus Sect leaders who were missing from the fight. We utterly devastated their ranks with waves of qi attacks, arrows, and reflective formations that blasted back attacks that were sent toward us. While Keiko had been working on her illusion formations, Naomi worked on those reflective formations. She focused them on metal qi, seeing as most members of the Indus Sect used metal qi in at least some capacity. Any qi attack with at least a bit of metal qi in it would be bounced back directly toward the cultivator who launched it with increased strength.

Later, she explained that Sensei had walked her through making them, but that they were very difficult to work with and, if it weren’t for Keiko waking up and helping reinforce them with universal qi, that they wouldn’t have worked.

We finally tracked down the final remaining Indus Sect pair in what could only have been called a sanctum. It was a very small room, no more than fifteen feet on a side and directly in the center of it were a pair of yellow and green orbs sitting on pedestals of what appeared to be worked bone. Keiko and I made to enter the room, but Aria and Gong Jin stopped us. I wanted to protest, but I figured that it wasn’t my fight. Aria and Gong Jin had been dealing with the Indus Tribe their entire lives and both had lost numerous friends, allies, and family members to their machinations. They needed closure, we didn’t.

The only thing I did to help them was give each of them a single pill that would act as antitoxin for the following ten minutes, which proved to be incredibly useful.

The final pair of Indus Sect members, whose names I don’t care to remember, fought like demons. They sprayed out more toxic wood qi needles than I would’ve ever expected and I was an alchemist. The problem is, the antitoxin pills I’d given to the pair were both high Journeyman rank, bordering on Expert, and the Indus Sect leaders’ toxic wood qi wasn’t virulent enough to breach the protection granted by the pills. By the time the Indus Sect leaders figured that out, it was too late.

I thought it was fitting that Aria caved in the skull of the man of the pair while Gong Jin beheaded the woman at the same time. They had both faked being affected by the poison for a moment to create the opening they needed to finish them off.

The next thing they did may have been a bit much, but I understood. Gong Jin kept the spin going from decapitating his half of the Indus Sect leaders and as he brought it around, he flipped it so that the spike was facing forward and drove it through the spirit crystals arrayed before him. The pair spirit crystals shattered with his mighty strike and the entire Inheritance shook as everything changed.

The second that both spirit crystals were removed from the worked bone pedestals, the kindly old couple, who Keiko and I knew to be the progenitors of the Inheritance of the Eclipse, appeared out of the places the spirit crystals have been resting on. The pedestals warped before our eyes to look like crouching dragons with open mouths, rather than their previous worked bone appearance. Keiko and I entered the room even as they bowed to Aria and Gong Jin.

The spiritual pair turned around to look at us and smiled, “Good job, your part of the bargain is finished. Please let us finish ours.”

Keiko laughed, “That’s all we can ask. You’re in charge for a while, hopefully forever.” She threw her arm around me and squeezed, which really hurt considering how strong she was. I didn’t let it faze me as I swung her up into my arms and gave her a passionate kiss.

“We did it, the Indus Sect is no more and the proper authorities were put back in place in this Inheritance.” I turned to look at Aria and Gong Jin and found them weeping in each other’s arms, but they weren’t tears of victory, they were tears of loss long held in until this deed could be done… until they could finally say that they had vanquished their foes.

Sensei spoke up from my hip, “Leave them be, but don’t leave the island until they’re ready. They need their privacy, but will need you soon, Mark my words.”

The progenitor spirits looked at the spatial bag on my hip quizzically, “Is that another Emperor in your spatial bag Steven? How did that happen?”

I shrugged, “Before I came here, actually on the way here, I found the Inheritance of the Pot, which was created thousands of years after your Inheritance. Actually, Sensei’s son and daughter-in-law came through here, their names were Elliott and Chandra Torak. Do you remember them?”

I heard Sensei gasp as the woman of the pair nodded, “I remember Elliott and Chandra, they were quite a lovely couple. They wanted to go out and explore the world and I hope they did. It’s a shame to know that they passed on, but it’s understandable, seeing as so much time has passed. It’s nice to know that their father is still around, in one state or another.”

Sensei was absolutely gobsmacked, so he wasn’t able to respond. I helped him out on that front, “Actually, they went on to form their own Inheritance focused on paired cultivation, they called it the Inheritance of the Lovers. They’re actually still running it, kind of. They actually intended for the Inheritance of the Lovers to act as a stepping stone before entering your Inheritance of the Eclipse, but due to your successors successors’ actions, that didn’t happen.”

The male spirit hissed, “Those two, good for nothing, louts! I can’t believe we didn’t see through their lies. Rest assured, nothing like that will ever happen to get in this Inheritance, we’ll see to it.” He turned to his partner, “Actually, seeing as there’s a force coming this way to kill everyone on this island… we should put the old protections back in place. What do you think?”

She laughed, even as she nodded, “That’s exactly what I was thinking. I may have even gotten started already.”

The fighting up until the point we reached the final chamber of the Indus Sect’s headquarters had taken nearly two hours, despite the fact that the Dragon dancing Sect hadn’t had a single casualty, mostly due to our overwhelming numbers. That’s not to discount the actions and fighting prowess of my Sect mates, they were all doing their best and fought honorably. The thing is, Keiko and I, along with our Sect elders all knew that the Gentle River Sect wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of the same thing we did, but they wouldn’t limit themselves to taking out the Indus Sect, they would be coming for us as well.

From outside the barrier, we all heard Alayna scream, “Come out here, you ungrateful dogs! I’m here to put you down like the rabid monsters you are.” Her voice reverberated through the entire island, despite the fact that Bortus hadn’t spoken, she’d obviously managed to use the technique they’d used together when meeting Keiko and I for the first time. That didn’t speak well for Bortus’ situation.

I looked at the original progenitors of the Inheritance expectantly, “Are you going to let her talk to us like that? We are your heirs…” I chuckled to myself.

Keiko gasped that I’d said that out loud, but there was no one else there but Aria and Gong Jin and those two were still sobbing in the corner, so even if they’d heard me, they might not have trusted what they heard. Though, truth be told, if they knew, I wasn’t worried about it.

The female progenitor grinned, “Oh, just you wait. Step outside the barrier and let it happen. Trust me, you’ll be totally unharmed no matter what she does.”

Despite Keiko’s insistence that I was an idiot for it, I did exactly as she said. I walked out the gate of the former Indus Sect’s headquarters and stood below the floating form of Alayna. Bortus was hanging behind her on his own disk, which again, spoke volumes for his mental state.

She didn’t even try to talk to me, she just tried to skewer me with a sword unlike anything I’d ever seen before. It was a long sword with no edges, but instead it had a wicked point. I learned later that it was called an estoc. The second before her estoc reached my skin a golden formation formed upon my chest and blasted her back into the air, tossing her off her disk and sending her hurtling down into the clouds below. The thing is, not a single member of her Sect tried to stop her from falling, not even her guards, who gathered behind Bortus in a show of solidarity. They nodded to me, even as he floated down to talk to me.

He clutched his heart, but soon stopped and looked over at me with pain in his eyes, “She’s dead, I can confirm that. I have to tell you how sorry I am that she did what she did to you and Keiko. The formation she was trying to create didn’t even work, she couldn’t figure out the last steps and blew up our island, totally destroying everything we’d built in our time here. If it weren’t for the powerful formations on the pagoda itself, none of us would have survived. When I saw her formation going wrong, I had everyone join me inside the pagoda, which managed to survive the blast. Now, all that’s left on the island is a newly reactivated volcano with a pagoda floating in the middle of a pool of lava.” He clutched his chest again, but it didn’t look like it hurt as badly as the first time because he recovered much more quickly. “The Gentle River Sect is no more, as of right now, I’m dissolving it. Also, I’d like you to have these,” he reached up and plucked off the black and white earrings he was wearing before producing a second pair from his pocket. He held them out for me to take.

I took them hurriedly, “Why are you giving these to me? Shouldn’t you give them directly to Naomi and Taka?”

He shook his head sadly, “I don’t know if they’d take them if they knew they came from me, but I know they would if they thought they came from you. All I ask is that you make sure that Naomi and Taka have a good life outside of here, because this place is not nearly big enough to contain stars as bright as theirs.”

The guards floating behind him echoed his sentiments.

I laughed, “I can see that your cultivation is not slowly withering up and dying, so I guess you managed to put up some sort of barrier between you and Alayna in the past few months?”

He shook his head, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t put up the barrier I knew I should have. The thing is, losing your partner in paired cultivation isn’t lethal, the feeling of loss and emptiness is what causes people to detonate their cultivation bases. It’s almost always the grief that causes that reaction. I’ve been feeling like I was losing her for months and now I just feel free, though there is actual physical pain and that does hurt quite a bit.” He laughed, “I’m planning on leaving this Inheritance soon, but I’d like to leave with you when you go, so I’ll wait until then, if you’d have me?”

Keiko came up behind me, “We’d love to have you, Bortus. You’re a good man despite your partner’s actions. Maybe you can make a new life with the Dawnrise Clan or the Moonbeam Clan, though they’ve probably combined by now so you wouldn’t have to choose where you lived. Either way, when we leave, we’ll make sure that you can come with us.”

Keiko and I both shook Bortus’ hand and then the hands of his guards, who turned out to be fully loyal to Bortus. They had been bound by contracts to Alayna, but with her dead, they were free to act as they wanted.